The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. (Psalms 51 : 17 )
I will give a cloak of praise to replace a constricted spirit. (Isaiah 61 : 3 )And so on.
“Spirit” can also mean the nature of a corrupt and unjust mind, as
the following passages make clear:
He spoke to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit.
(Ezekiel 13 : 3 )
Conceive garbage, give birth to stubble; in your spirit, fire will con-
sume you. (Isaiah 33 : 11 )
A man who is a wanderer in his spirit and who babbles a lie. (Micah 2 : 11 )
A generation whose spirit was not steadfast with God. (Psalms 78 : 8 )
A spirit of promiscuity. (Hosea 5 : 4 ; 4 : 12 )
To melt every heart and constrict every spirit. (Ezekiel 21 : 7 )
What has come up in your spirit will never be done. (Ezekiel 20 : 32 )
Provided there is no guile in their spirit. (Psalms 32 : 2 )
The spirit of Pharaoh was disturbed. (Genesis 41 : 8 )Likewise the spirit of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 2 : 3 ). These and many
other passages make it obvious that our “spirit” means our mind and its
characteristics.
Since our spirit means our mind, therefore “being in the spirit,” as 157
the Word sometimes says, refers to the state of our mind when it is sepa-
rated from our body. In this state the prophets saw the sort of things that
exist in the spiritual world; therefore this state is called “a vision of God.”
At those times, the prophets’ state was like the state of spirits and angels
in the spiritual world. In this state our spirit can move from place to
place while our body stays where it is (as is also true of our mind’s eye).
This is the state I myself have been in now for twenty-six years, with
the difference that I am in my spirit and my body at the same time, and
only sometimes out of my body.
Ezekiel, Zechariah, Daniel, and John (when he wrote the Book of
Revelation) were in this state, as is clear from the following passages:
Ezekiel said, “The spirit lifted me up and led me into Chaldea to the cap-
tivity in the vision of God,in the spirit of God.In this way the visionthat I
§157 the holy spirit & divine action 219